On Sat, 26 Apr 2008, Stefan Richter wrote:> > Well, the need to amend single patches --- and folding the amendment in before> mainline submission to correct important problems of the first shot --- is> something which happens all the time.

.. and you simply SHOULD NOT PUBLICIZE the tree before it has gotten to a reasonable point.

Keep the rough-and-not-ready thing that is being discussed as patches on lkml as your own working tree, and just don't expose it as a public git branch. You can't do any sane discussion over git anyway - if things are being actively worked-on among people, you'd be passing patches around as emails etc.

Yes, people may be (and I would strongly suggest _should_ be) using something like git or quilt etc to keep track of the patches that they (and others) have been discussing over email, but that has absolutely nothing to do with making a public git tree available to others.

So: - making things public is *different* from developing them. Don't push out just because you committed something!

- you shouldn't publicize a tree until it's in reasonable shape. EVER. Even -mm or -next is *not* better off with a pile of sh*t just because you're working in that area.

I cannot stress this enough. I think Andrew has been way too polite to some people.

- and once it is, you generally shouldn't mess with old commits even when you fix things. Full cleanliness or always being able to bisect specific configurations is not an excuse for messing up all the other things, and if this problem happens a lot, I would like to point you to the two previous points.